Since Summer of Code 2007 is opening soon, we've started discussion about it within the GNOME community. With our experience of previous SoC, I'm quite confident that we'll get most things right.

All the information about SoC from the GNOME perspective is on the wiki (thanks to Clare for working on this page!). It's still a draft (so if you're a student, make sure to read it again when it'll be finalized), but it should be nearly complete. Of course, feel free to improve it!

SoC Meetings

We had a meeting last week so we could know what worked well in previous years, but also to work on a plan to fix the issues we met, and to generally improve our SoC experience. Here's a short summary of some of the decisions we took:

• ask students for weekly reports, so everybody can track the progress of the various projects
• give students access to some infrastructure where they can put their code (most probably a svn sandbox, but this still needs discussion with the sysadmins)
• some rough guidelines for the selection process (what kind of projects we'd like to have, creation of a selection team, etc.)

You can read the minutes of this meeting to have a more complete overview.

We're also organizing another meeting today/tomorrow (Tuesday :-)) at 20:00 UTC in #soc, so feel free to join the meeting. Here's the proposed agenda.

Project Ideas

We've started to collect ideas of projects that would be great for SoC. In case you're out of ideas, here's something that might give you some: during our meeting, people generally agreed that having projects about sexy bling in GNOME would rock.

Raphaël also wisely suggested that we should triage the list of ideas before students start applying, which is a great idea.

Selection Team

One of the important decisions during last meeting was that there will be a selection team to select the projects for GNOME. Last year, we organized a vote among all potential mentors, and the general feeling is that it was mostly chaotic. A small team will probably be in a better position to stay focused and wisely choose the projects. All potential mentors will be able to comment on all applications, but the final decision will be this team's decision.

If you want to be part of this team, please mail Behdad and me. I'm a bit worried that tons of people will apply to be in this team and that we'll have to have a selection process for this... Hopefully, this will be easier than that.

Two weeks ago, I wrote a Rhythmbox plugin to automatically change my Gossip status so that it displays the currently played song. I was amazed that it was possible to achieve this so easily, thanks to python and D-Bus. Here's the mandatory screenshot:

(Looks quite weird to see the tooltip and not the mouse cursor, doesn't it?)

There are of course small issues to fix: I don't know if it works with the latest python bindings for D-Bus, and quitting Rhythmbox/stopping the music leaves you with an empty status (that's a small Gossip bug).

You can install it with only a few steps: download the tarball and move the directory it contains to ~/.gnome2/rhythmbox/plugins/gossip. Enjoy!

Update: new tarball that should work for more people.